Time and again our men’s cricket team has shown a tendency to fall flat on their faces. Just as a week of unseasonal rain upsets the less prepared people, the “world’s best” cricketers seem to dissolve in the change in weather. In the present context, this period can cover three or four ODIs, or T20Is, meaning losing the series, unless you quickly correct course.
In the current tour of Ireland and England, the first shock came when Ireland won the first T20I. The ecstatic Irish were surprised beyond belief, and celebrated it like it was a once-in-a-lifetime bounty. But a couple of days later they won even the second T20I, and boy, their joy turned to, right on the ground itself, a palpable celebration of gushing confidence.
Just as well. They deserved it in every way.
What was surprising was how India couldn’t correct the mistakes of the first match loss. What is so perennially lacking in the Indian psyche that we seem to suffer a never-able-to-recover-from-a-shock-loss syndrome. Most major teams would scrutinize with scientific intensity the problems, and spot them, and find ways to address them before the next game. In this way, you rarely find such teams repeating the mistakes of the earlier game.
But we go into a spiraling freefall of helpless disarray. We sickeningly repeat the same mistakes – not just again – but again and again, praying that some divine intervention come their way and help get them out of this mortifying morass.
We are a very unique people. We can be unmatchably passionate about rather simple things while being shockingly indifferent to very grave matters. Cricket is a religion across all sections of our citizenry. Victories by our cricket team are celebrated as joyously as if it were every cricket lover’s personal jackpot. And defeats, particularly a series of them, can lead to national gloom, and even depression.
Our cricketers owe it to the cricket lovers to be deft enough to understand on-field adversities and find quick solutions to them. They are “professionals”, national heroes and demi-gods to their fans. These fans virtually ‘worship’ their ‘heroes’, and contribute significantly to their astronomical commercial worth. The cricketing ‘heroes’ owe a lot in gratitude embodied by excellence in the game, to the game, to the spirit of professionalism, and to these adulating fans. They need to pull up their socks and be true to their salt.
Reasons such as “different playing conditions” (from those at home), “spongy wicket” (that cushions the ball’s impact on the pitch, or the “extra bounce due to a very hard pitch”, etc, are mere facets of the game. True professionals are expected to quickly adapt to these different playing conditions. It’s not like they were biased against. It’s the same playing conditions for everybody.
As professionals at the highest level of the game, and with a spate of individual team members labeled “the best in the world”, there is nothing less than the utmost degree of human ability that they need to possess and demonstrate for all that the game has given them. No less can be acceptable.
This is not criticism. This is a wake-up call. Let the heroes and their fans, both, deserve the best from each other.
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